Participative teaching for undergraduate students with mobile devices and social networks Livia Ştefan Institute for Computers ITC SA Bucharest, Romania
[email protected]
Dragoş Gheorghiu Doctoral School, National University of Arts, Bucharest, Romania
[email protected]
Abstract: The paper refers to a set of participatory pedagogical experiments conducted within a research grant PN II IDEI (”Maps of Time. Real communities, virtual worlds, experimented pasts”) performed with the purpose of helping rural communities to identify their cultural heritage and to transmit it to the young generation by means of modern IT technologies, including web 2.0. In a Danubian rural community, points of archaeological interest (POI) were identified and then included in a geographic augmented reality application for smartphones and tablets. Subsequently, the geographic data (POIs) were collected from the archaeological site by the undergraduate students, under the coordination of an academic staff from the National University of Arts in Bucharest (the designers of the project), and stored on their devices using Google Maps. The augmented information delivered on the site was annotated and shared with other undergraduate students, by means of several social networks sites (SNS) and microblogging postings. We consider that with our experiments the information related to the identity of several places and communities can be made very visible among the young generation. Mobile-learning paradigm, in combination with web 2.0 technologies, was the support for a distributed and low-cost platform for communication and collaboration. This social network linked the archaeological heritage and the academic research with the larger community of rural undergraduate students. The paper analyzes this platform in regard with the shared content and presents conclusions on using social media for effective mobile learning. Keywords: immaterial heritage, mobile-learning, social learning, augmented reality, social media, microblogging, user-created content, learning community. 1. Introduction In this paper we propose and present an experimental learning system for undergraduate K12 students that uses mobile technologies and social media, focused on teacher-student and studentstudent communication and cooperation, and on research, experimentation, play-like learning, all combined in a creative manner. With the support of web 2.0 technologies and services, particularly social media, the proposed learning community can be extended to larger groups of students and schools. This paper will discuss a part of the experiments carried out in Vădastra village with the local undergraduate teachers and children aged 8-12 years, specifically, the experiments involving the use of web 2.0 services at different stages of the project implementation: content creation, processing and sharing. We shall present results of using social media with mobile technologies, and in particular, with a mobile Augmented Reality application (MAR), with the purpose to implement a distributed and low-cost learning platform for a community in a remote and relatively isolated Romanian village. The social media services - Google Maps, Panoramio, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Google Drive - were used from desktop stations, mobile devices and from the MAR application. The paper presents also statistical facts on using social media for this educational experiment and conclusions on using social media for effective mobile learning. 1
2. The paper background The present paper is part of an educational strategy in a larger exploratory research project, grant PN II Idei1, which intends to reconstruct the memory of forgotten places and share it with the local community, thus helping it to preserve and safeguard the material and immaterial heritage. The following imperative arguments of the contemporary society justify the project: the necessity to relate art and science to create new instruments for visual epistemic exploration in the humanities and science; the necessity to apply and develop hybrid concepts between real and virtual; the necessity to work in real and virtual networks at the urban and rural levels; the necessity to preserve the cultural memory and to bring the Past within the Present; the necessity to reveal culturally invisible places; the necessity to help poor communities who can benefit from it, to build a new identity through the exploitation of the local Past. In addition, this project demonstrates how art can act as a social link between urban (academic) and rural communities. Particularly, the paper is concerned with learning in the 21st century in rural Romania and it is based on a case study in Vădastra village in southern Oltenia. In this project we used the social media services having both technical and economical reasons. Technically, social media was used to support a mobile-learning paradigm in a community that has scarce financial resources and basic communications infrastructure. We considered that the technologies and services of present web, the web 2.0, could help to design and implement a distributed network for sharing multimedia pedagogic content, but especially to support a model of informal learning based on an active community involving undergraduate students, school teachers and academic teachers. This network can be accessed from anywhere and at any time, both from fixed and mobile equipments, provided that an Internet connection is available. From an economic perspective, as we used free web services which involve non-permanent Internet connections, there were no major costs. Given the economic situation of the Romanian education, we consider this strategy being practical and realistic to link the academic system with a remote undergraduate (K-12) system. 3. The research work The practical method proposed to implement the project’s objectives was the creation of archaeological information layers, allowing a vertical immersion of the user in the past times. In Vădastra two main layers were identified, that provide the site identity - a prehistoric one, according to [14][15] and a Roman one, quite visible as surface finds, but not yet archaeologically inventoried. These two layers were geographically marked and further used in the educational process, in a mobile Augmented Reality application for smartphones and tablet PCs [7] (figure 3). Augmented Reality (AR) is a modern IT technology which is able to overlap several computer-generated ("virtual") information over real life images of objects or scenes. The result is what it is called an “augmented” reality, which offers an enhanced perception, an improved understanding and a new user experience. The technical definition of the Augmented Reality is given by Azuma in [2]: "an environment that includes both virtual reality and real-world elements". The information is generated by the computer in the original AR sense, 3D images, i.e. acting on the visual perception which is the sense with the most important cognitive impact. Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) allows the visualization of location-sensitive or contextual information, using modern mobile devices equipped with video camera, GPS receivers, and orientation sensors like compass and accelerometer. The MAR paradigm has the technical advantage that is based on readily available portable equipments, thus targeting the broader mass of users, not only the academic research circles. This is the reason why MAR is used, especially in the last two years, as a driving technology for the mobile learning paradigm. MAR supports the 1
“The Maps of Time. Real communities, virtual worlds, experimented pasts”, Director Professor Dragoş Gheorghiu. 2
contextualization of the learning, providing a situation in "true learning contexts" [4], impossible to perform with desktop computers, and "the acquisition or modification of any knowledge and skill through using mobile technology" [6]. This usage of AR also led to an evolution of the AR technology itself, by introducing new types of augmented content, such as 2D images, text, audio, video files. Educause (a non-profit association having as a goal the explanation and promotion of e-learning technologies) [5] states in one of its studies that Augmented Reality is important for educational implementations because it is an innovative technology for search, visualization and manipulation of information. According to [16], social media represents “a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundation of the web 2.0. and allow the creation and exchange of user generated content”. The Augmented Reality technology operates with similar concepts: geotagging and geolocation. A geotag is [13]: “a GPS coordinate that associates content such as videos, textual information, audio or any user-generated content to a specific location”. AR applications can use geotagged content offered by third party providers or user-created content, collected by means of geo-referenced services like Google Maps or Panoramio, or provided by geo content aggregators (geo RSS). MAR that triggers the augmented media based on the geographic location or orientation of the user are named geoAR or Augmented Reality Browsers (or simply browsers), and operates with the concept of POIs (Points of Interest). A larger set of POIs can be aggregated using KML, Google Maps’ file format. video files, which are similar to podcasts, very familiar in web 2.0 environments. The development of AR applications makes use of processes similar to those found in social media technologies, such as: 1. Authoring - the process of creating a link between the virtual and the real world objects, and defining a behavior (uninitiated user action) of the virtual/digital object (the augmentation) [13]. The content creator can specify a reference to a point of interest (POI) or to an image or fiducial marker at which the digital object is anchored. The result is a form of markup which provides a structured format for describing the augmentation, such as ARML [18], KARML [19] or XML. 2. The provenance of the content - the process of content source specification before being used in an authoring/publishing process [13]. 3. Publishing - the process that allows the discovery of the augmentations. Metadata are used in the data transfer between the servers [13]. Regarding the existing commercial AR platforms, two important features may differentiate them: a) crowd sourcing, which allows content creation by regular users using facilities available in the browser itself, and b) integration with social media, i.e. social networks sites (SNS) or other environments for content share. Users can comment and invite others to share their experience, by posting short text messages, i.e. contributing by means of microblogging, images or movies. If users contribute with content, this can be visualized by future users of the AR application. Social media implements web 2.0. concepts: content creation, aggregation, search or distribution and fulfills social functions, such as promotion of ideas, posting news, share content, perform user’s self-promotion, socialization, communication, networking, blogging [17]. This results in distributed informational clusters or “ecosystems” [3], organized in categories or topics. Therefore, used in e-learning settings, social media may have an important role to create and distribute information, to stimulate students and teachers to assume participative roles. Most important, social media can make the educational process continue beyond the actual presentation of a lesson. Social media led to Learning 2.0, a new concept of social learning, in which the student is offered not only an access to an archive of information to be self-paced studied, but also a dynamic environment in which the knowledge is constructed through socialization, participation and as needed [3]. 3
4. Results The experiment in Vădastra village began by geo-referencing some points of interest in the archaeological area [8][9], which were identified from the scholarly papers and the oral information from villagers, and after a fieldwork for over a decade of carrying out experiments in this village [10][11]. The geographic data (POIs) were collected on the archaeological site by the undergraduate students, under the coordination of an academic staff from the National University of Arts in Bucharest (members of the project). Social media techniques were used in all stages of the experiment, as indicated in [16]: a) the content production, b) the content processing, c) the content distribution and publication. A POI collection was established using the application “GPS Test” from Android Play Store and loaded on Google Maps, the Android version. The POIs were corrected, filtered and used in the authoring process of a geo-AR application for smartphones and tablets, and also in order to attach and share multimedia artistic and pedagogic content (photos and videos) on Panoramio, Google Maps and Google+.
Figure 1 An experiment of building a prehistoric house, carried out by Professor Dragoş Gheorghiu in Vădastra. Posted on Panoramio at: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/46824541
Figure 2 An experiment with sunken up-draught kilns, carried out by Professor Dragoş Gheorghiu in Vădastra. Posted in Panoramio at: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/46824577 The second stage was that of the physical reconstruction at real scale of a prehistoric house and of a corner of a Roman villa rustica, designed and coordinated by Professor Dragoş Gheorghiu. In these physical reconstructions video and photo shootings were made, in order to be used later as augmentations in the AR application and for distribution by means of SNS. The third stage was the 3D virtual reconstruction process of historical contexts, in our case a prehistoric village and a complete Roman villa rustica, with the help of students from the Design
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Department, NUA2, coordinated by Professor Andreea Hasnaş. These virtual objects were the main augmentations attached to POIs, for which we used two AR commercial platforms, Layar and Junaio and Hoppala [30] as a Content Management System. These POIs were also augmented with extra content: 2D images, videos representing 3D virtual tours and technological processes (figures 3,4,5), and connected to email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ services. The fourth stage was the use of social media to build a social learning network based on content and experience sharing and creation. The following web 2.0 services were used as a distributed platform able to create and experiment our learning system: a) Panoramio [25] which is a geo-referenced photo-sharing service over Google Maps and Google Earth; b) Twitter [26], as a social network and microblogging service; c) Google+ [27], as a platform for sharing and tagging multiple content (photo, video), blogging and video chatting service with the recent Google Hangout; d) Google Drive [28] for cloud storage and collaborative document editing. We also created a YouTube channel for public distribution of video content [29]. 5. Discussion A first educational level allowed village children and students working in the project to go through an information discovery stage using smartphones and tablet PCs. It was a kind of play of discovering in the local landscape the historical information, but this play was restricted to a limited number of participants. In order to avoid to remain at a simple playful level involving a small group of participants, the beneficiaries of the application, i.e. school children and teachers, began: a) to note and comment the personal experience of participating in the authoring process – they used Panoramio (figure 1, 2) and Google+ (figure 8) and Twitter to vizualize and share texts, photos and short movies; b) to send onsite comments and annotations via email or Twitter, i.e. to contribute by microblogging; c) to participate in the creation of new content and share it through Google+. The information from a) and b) have been used by other colleagues in the local school and in the future, will be used by other schools in the country or abroad, this representing the second educational level in the project. Information from c) were analyzed, filtered and assessed for enhancing the content of the AR platform. An example of user-created content are movies recording the children while exercising traditional crafts (figure 6, 7). To achieve the impression of an unified and coherent platform, the personal spaces of the social networks were customized with logos and landing pages, designed by Associate Professor Marina Theodorescu3. For Google+ we created the "Circle" of friends using Google accounts for undergraduate students and the educational staff (school teachers and academic professors). For microblogging we used the Twitter service. Tweets with a hashtagged main topic #MapsOfTimeSummerSchool and keywords related to the 3 taught technologies - textiles, glass, ceramics - where created. In [24] it is shown that 40.55% of tweets are easy conversations (“pointless babble”) and only 37.55% messages are meaningful conversations. Used in educational projects Twitter can stimulate a synthetic communication, because it imposes a limited number of characters for message postings. Recently, the service has been extended with the facility to attach 6 second-short movies, furthermore stimulating the ability to express essential ideas. Another important feature of the Twitter is that it uses t.co [31], a URL shortening service, with the declared purpose of protecting users from malicious sites [21] and offering the possibility to track the clicks on the links inside the tweets [22] and providing a useful statistics. The participants in our learning experiment considered Twitter to be the most sophisticated social media instrument in the project, which necessitated learning of shorthand commands. For children, Twitter contributed also to computer literacy.
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As a criticism of Twitter we mention the fact that the children can also see other topics, including those from the “Twitter World”, thus the environment had to be beforehand prepared with Twitter-specific security settings. Twitter was used by academic teachers to draw attention to certain topics and to draw conclusions on the interest in the taught technologies and also toward our e-elearning experiment. For statistics we used Twitter’s free counters, the section "Trends", that lists the most followed items and "Lists”, that lists users interested in our posts. For more complex and detailed statistics, free services can be used, such as tweetreach [23]. Google+ and Google Drive platforms were able to support a more complex virtual environment, for content collaboration and learning reflection, and useful for teachers for analysis and assessment. Google+ enabled storage of the on-site user-created content, and allowed us to create an archive of photos and videos. Google Drive allowed collaboration on the development of teaching materials by school teachers from Vădastra school. The third educational level was the refinement of these collective data by teachers from 4 NUA and from Vădastra school, i.e. the use of social media in institutional environments [16]. Analyzing the content shared by children, the strengths and weaknesses of our learning experiment can be identified.
Figure 3. Augmented Reality with archaeological stratigraphy (a prehistoric house and a Roman villa reconstructed in 3D)
Figure 4. Augmented Reality with movie (a vertical loom in front of two reconstructed kilns and a wall of a Roman villa rustica) and social media
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Figure 5. Fiber artist Alexandra Rusu (National University of Arts Bucharest) working at a vertical loom
Figure 6. Children exercising weaving techniques under the control of the staff from the National University of Arts Bucharest
Figure 7. Children exercising glass-engraving techniques under the control of the staff from the National University of Arts Bucharest
Figure 8. Virtual social space on Google+
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At our learning experiment 10 undergraduate students from Vădastra school, 4 undergraduate teachers, 4 academic professors and 3 assistant professors from NUA have participated. We made a statistic graphic regarding the main social media used in the project, and resulted that Panoramio (figure 9) was the most visited and Google+ had the majority of postings (figure 10).
Figure 9. Social media visits
Figure 10. Social media postings 5. Conclusions We conducted an ICT educational experiment by creative combining multiple software technologies: mobile-learning; geographic AR; social media. Social media allowed us to enhance the informal educational process, initially implemented with contextual situation and user mobility, with participation, reflection and analysis outside of actual lessons. We have created a distributed learning community around an artistical and technical content, involving also an AR application. Social media provided us the tools for analyzing the efficiency of our experiment. Several social media services have been experimented for geographic and social content share and tagging, socialization and microblogging, each stimulating different ways of learning and communication of ideas. Social media was a tool for engaging the undergraduate students and making them more aware of the learning process. Generally used as a means of capturing and sharing of content and user experiences, through systematic use and maintaining the quality of the information, social media can lead to knowledge creation. The social services in general and in particular used with mobile technologies and a geo-AR application could create a distributed geo-referenced network, a low-cost platform for communication and collaboration among undergraduate students and academic teachers. We consider that with our experiments the information related to the identity of several places and communities can be made very visible among the young generation. Social media proved to be a cost-effective technology and infrastructure for this approach in which academia can engage itself creatively and effectively in the development of undergraduate 8
education in villages, and not only. Thus, the gap that exists between the academic and the undergraduate educational systems can be overriden. Social media can also open a new way for future collaboration and information transmission in various knowledge fields. Acknowledgements We wish to thank Mrs. Laura Voicu, the principal of the Vădastra school, Vădastra village, Olt county, Romania, for her help and involvement in our experimentations. The authors also thank professor Andreea Hasnaş, assistant professor Alexandra Rusu and technician Elena Hăut (NUA) for their collaboration. The project was financed by an exploratory research, grant PN II IDEI (The Maps of Time. Real communities, virtual world, experimented pasts, Director Prof. Dragoş Gheorghiu). Images by D. Gheorghiu and A. Şerbănescu. References [1.] Alsheail, A. (2010). Teaching English as a second/foreign language in a ubiquitous learning environment: A guide for ESL/EFL instructors. [2.] Azuma, R. (1997). A Survey of Augmented Reality. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 355-388. [3.] Brown J., S., & Adler, R., P. (2011). Minds on fire. Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. www.educause.com. [4.] Dede, C. (2009). Immersive Interfaces for Engagement and Learning, Harvard Graduate School of Education. [5.] EDUCAUSE. www.educause.com. [6.] Geddes, S., J. (2004). Mobile learning in the 21st century: benefit for learners. Knowledge Tree e-journal: An ejournal of flexible learning in VET, Vol. 30 No.3, pp. 214-28. [7.] Gheorghiu, D., & Stefan, L. (2012). Mobile Technologies and the Use of Augmented Reality for Saving the Immaterial Heritage, pp. 21-24. in D. Arnold, J. Kaminski, F. Niccolucci, and A. Stork (eds.), The 13th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST (2012). [8.] Gheorghiu, D., & Stefan, L. (2013). Preserving monuments in the memory of local communities using Augmented Reality applications, Proceedings, World Archaeological Congress, Jordan, p. 179. [9.] Gheorghiu, D., & Stefan, L. (in preparation). (2013). Patrimoniu imaterial şi memorie digitală. Recuperarea, stocarea şi transmiterea tehnologiilor din trecut. Al treilea Simpozion ARHEOINVEST, Arheologia și politicile de protejare a patrimoniului cultural. [10.] Gheorghiu, D. (2001). Le projet Vădastra, Prehistorie Europeenne,16-17, Liege. [11.] Gheorghiu, D. (2008). Cultural landscapes in the Lower Danube area. Experimenting tell settlements, Documenta Praehistorica XXXV, pp. 7-13. [12.] Hamilton, K., E. (2011). Augmented Reality in Education. http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/k3hamilton-478823-augmented-reality-in-education/. [13.] JISC Observatory. (2011). Augmented Reality for Smartphones. A Guide for developers and content publishers. [14.] Mateescu, C. (1959). Sapaturi arheologice la Vădastra, Materiale si cercetari arheologice. pp. 61-74. [15.] Mateescu, C. (1975). Remarks on cattle breeding and agriculture in the middle and late Neolithic of the Lower Danube. Dacia XIX, pp. 13-18. [16.] Nentwich, M., Konig R. (2012). Cyberscience 2.0 - Research in the Age of Digital Social Networks. Campus Verlag GmbH. [17.] Zeiller, M., Schauer, B. 2011. Adoption, Motivation and Success Factors of Social Media for Team Collaboration in SMEs. i-KNOW '11 Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies, ACM. 9
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Livia ŞTEFAN (b. April 18, 1963) received her MSc in Telephony and Data Transmissions at the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications, University Politehnica Bucharest (1987). At present she is PhD student at University Politehnica Bucharest and R&D software engineer at the Institute for Computers ITC Bucharest. Her current research interests include educational technologies, e-learning in 3D virtual environments, virtual reality, augmented reality, web 2.0, cloud-computing. She has (co-) authored more than 20 papers and participated in more than 10 conferences. She is a professional member of the Romanian Medical Informatics Society, IEEE Computer Society and ACM. Professor Dragoş GHEORGHIU (b. June 27, 1953) received an MA in Fine Arts (1980) from the Institute of Arts, a BA in Architecture (1993) from the Institute of Architecture and a PhD in History (1992) from the University of Bucharest. He is an anthropologist and experimental archaeologist whose studies focus on the process of cognition and material culture. His most recent research is concerned with the reconstruction of ancient technologies in context, as well as their virtual reconstruction and exploration using AR and MR techniques. Professor Gheorghiu is author and co-author of multiple books and has a sustained publication activity on prehistoric material culture and semiotics in Europe. The last decade he tried to transfer the know-how from experimental archaeology to less developed rural communities.
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